Hideous List Supplier

A HIDEOUS LIST SUPPLIER HAS RUINED MY MORNINGS AND PUBLISHERS CLEARING HOUSE SLITHERS OUT OF MY COMPUTER!

James R. Rosenfield

February 2002

This is a product endorsement.

I bought a Telezapper at Radio Shack. Plugged into your answering machine, it tells the junk-call predictive dialer that your number has been disconnected.

As lists are bought and sold your phone number gets suppressed.

The promise is that within a month you get fewer junk calls. And it's happened! True, the local aluminum siding guy still calls, but that's a far cry from the predictive dialing hang-ups and painfully scripted sales pitches that are an unwelcome part of every American's dinner hour.

And better new yet, it looks like the government might finally ban predictive dialers, those unholy miracles of technology that rifle through telephone exchanges like runaway lawn mowers. They are the evil devices that create untold millions of hang-ups each night, because it's more cost-effective just to ring once or twice and then go on to the next number. The result? Millions of Americans are inconvenienced, and millions more, many of them elderly, fearful that their homes are being cased for a burglary.

The telemarketing industry, aided and abetted by the Direct Marketing Association, holds that commerce is more important than people. A telemarketing executive interviewed in a current trade journal says that 3 million telemarketing jobs are more important than people getting interrupted at dinner. How obtuse and clueless can you get! A clever nation of 300 million can surely find a better way to do telemarketing, and at the very least create equally horrific and demeaning jobs for the 3 million unfortunate telemarketers, who get abused and rejected for $6.50 an hour.

Anyway, I'm getting fewer junk calls. I wish I could get rid of spam this easily.

A HIDEOUS LIST SUPPLIER HAS RUINED MY MORNINGS!

A hideous list supplier recently sold an old e-mail address of mine to…well, to every sleaze artist who can use a computer, I guess. The logic of the Telezapper doesn't work here: Telemarketers would just as soon not call you if you don't exist, whereas e-mail is so cheap there's no particular motivation to get anyone off a list.

Alas, I made the awful mistake of clicking on "Unsubscribe" to get rid of one of these junk e-mails, not realizing I was inadvertently ratcheting up the amount of spam I receive, since my message told the spammers there's a live body here.

Talk about Internet time! It took direct mail about 80 years, say from 1900 to 1980, before people really started to hate it. It took outbound telemarketing maybe 15 years, from 1975 to 1990. It's taken spam 3 years, 1999 being the year that e-mail use reached real critical mass.

Opening my e-mail these days is a journey into a world of scams, thievery, and Barnumesque hootings. Imagine the worst ads in the back pages of the old Police Gazette, in HTML guise.

The mistargeting is ludicrous. Half the e-mails are addressed to a person named Stephanie. Gambling looms large, a vice to which I am not addicted, and offers are aimed at someone young, with money problems and a wayward attitude towards solving them. Hey, maybe 30 years ago, but I'm an old guy now!

Here's what I got, one week in February, 2002:

From Subject

Special Offer Uninsured? Why risk that?

Gamble Hog Special Promo $100 Match Bonus at Golden Riviera NOW!!!

Card Search Instant matching

Gambler Magnet Gambler Magnet - Bonus Hounds Issue!

Prizecade Notice of your free games

Wager Strip Full of Excitement & Fun -

GL Instant Winner Stephanie, You've got another chance to scratch

Nicole Stephanie, here's your FREE DVD

Emily Tired of Bad Cell Phone Reception?

Real Arcade Hot Game - Free Demo!

Gambler Magnet Gambler Magnet $100 Free from Golden Rivierra (sic)

GamblingSurf.com Get your FREEE (sic) $100 at Golden Comps NOW!!!

Samantha L. Copy DVD's

Special Unit Director Rush Priority Delivery for Stephanie…

Webmaster Amazing $150 Match Bonus!!!!

GamblerSurf.com Top Comp Award: $895 at Fortune Lounge!!

GamblerMagnet $350 Free Tonight - Enter the Casino Magnet!

Webmaster Bet on your Favorite Team Tonight! 35% Bonus Inside

GambleDog Royal Vegas Casino is giving it all away!

Exclusive Offers Hi Speed Media Wants You to WIN!

WagerStrip Over $800 Free to Start the Week!

GamblingSurf.com 100% Match Welcome Bonus

Synapse Can you read this valuable offer?

GamblingSurf.com 50% Bonus TONIGHT at THE Casino Joe's!!

Winfreestuff.com Win a 2002 Tahoe!

The exclamation points alone can give you a headache.

I have never made a bet in my life, nor entered a lottery. Nor am I Stephanie.

It was almost - but not quite - with a sense of relief that I spotted an old friend in the midst of all this dreck.
Yes, oozing its way into my e-mail was none other than…you guessed it, Publishers Clearing House!

PUBLISHERS CLEARING HOUSE SLITHERS OUT OF MY COMPUTER!

Pulverized by the press, mangled by the media, jujitsued by the judiciary, crushed by Congress, Publishers Clearing House somehow manages to survive, although I guess in a truncated form. I certainly haven't seen a mailing in a long time. But who knows, e-mail can be their salvation, given the low cost of the medium.

For those with short memories, and for those outside the U.S., Publishers Clearing House (PCH), along with its partner in nefariousness American Family Publishers, for years mailed 30 million sweepstakes packages at a time into American households, peddling magazines and cheap junk, but most importantly the dream of getting rich quick. The direct mail packages were masterpieces of their kind, and used every manipulative trick in the book to get people to buy lots of stuff, even though by law a purchase makes no difference in your odds.

So many old widows squandered their meager savings on magazines and merchandise that it finally got the attention of several state Attorney Generals, not to mention Congress itself, and the sweepstakes companies ended up getting their wings clipped, big time.

In fairness to the sweepstakes outfits, their apparently evil acts were an unfortunate unintended consequence of the direct marketing process: You mail the most to your best customers. Their best customers happened to be old people easily fooled into thinking they would stand a better chance of winning if they bought something.

That said, the sheer over-the-top manipulativeness of their copy would have made a hyena blush. I wrote lots about this back in the old days, and if you want to gasp in horror and perhaps enjoy a yuck or two, visit my website, scroll through the Bibliography, and get in touch with us.

But that was then. Now poor PCH must have lawyers emerging from orifices, so cautious is their copy:

"Here's some exciting news for you and anyone who wants to win a life changing sum of money."

Compare this tepid bit of nothingness to the roaring headlines of the past:

"If you have and return the winning ticket we will announce that
JIM ROSENFIELD IS OUR $10,000,000 WINNER!!! "

And, most galling of all, right over the SUBMIT button by which you enter the sweepstakes and, perhaps, buy your magazines, there is an unequivocal statement, in highly visible boldfaced type, "No Purchase Necessary. Buying Won't Help You Win."

Nor will anything else, given the long, long odds. The great shame is that so much direct marketing talent has historically been squandered on sweepstakes, get rich quick schemes, medical quackery, and other genres of sleaze. The Internet, being a direct marketing medium, is the unfortunate heir to this very dark side of what should be one of the world's most interesting and challenging marketing disciplines. I mean, how do you go home at night after writing span for Gambledog?

Maybe you don't.